The ability to talk and communicate effectively is essential to your health and well-being, not to mention your happiness. After sustaining a brain injury, your ability to communicate might be affected significantly depending on the severity of the injury and where it happened in your brain.
If you’ve had any kind of speech therapy after brain injury, you know that it can be an uphill battle to re-establish basic communication skills. However, a brain treatment center can offer comprehensive speech therapy services, including evaluation and treatment of communication, cognitive, and swallowing disorders resulting from conditions such as TBI, stroke, and neurodegenerative diseases.
Here’s what you should know about speech therapy after brain injury and how it can help you recover from your injury.
Language Difficulties After a TBI
Slurred speech, poor pronunciation, and difficulty articulating thoughts are all symptoms of a TBI. Language disorders often result in speech that is slower, more deliberate, and filled with pauses as well as longer periods of silence. According to research, “Based on the area and extent of brain tissue damage, a person's ability to communicate can be impaired from mild-to-severe degree.”
When a stroke or injury to a brain region known as Broca’s area affects a person’s speech, it may result in dysarthria. The most common symptom of dysarthria is slurred speech. Their speech may sound weak, stifled, slow, or slurred. In severe cases, someone with dysarthria may be incomprehensible or impossible to understand. They might also have difficulty producing sounds or syllables and forming coherent sentences, which is categorized as Aphasia. Aphasia is a brain injury condition where a TBI victim has difficulty voicing sounds and syllables.
How Does Speech Therapy Help a Person With a Brain Injury?
Improves Cognitive Communication Skills
People who have sustained a brain injury can often struggle with cognitive processing issues. This can make it difficult to understand communication and lead to frustration for those involved in the conversation. Speech therapy after brain injury helps improve cognitive communication skills so that an individual may process conversations more effectively. Using exercises and techniques, speech therapists help individuals comprehend language, develop a strong vocabulary, speak fluently, and utilize appropriate tones when communicating with others.
Boosts Memory
In addition to improving overall speech abilities, research has shown that individuals who have undergone a course of speech therapy show significant improvement in memory skills, including word recall and semantic categorization. There are several techniques a therapist can use to help boost memory and concentration in individuals suffering from a brain injury.
Ameliorates social language skills
Social language, which includes both verbal and nonverbal communication, plays an important role in human interactions, as it is how we share our ideas, thoughts, and emotions with others. Therefore, any change to these communication skills can have a negative impact on an individual’s ability to function socially. Speech therapy helps them become more adept at communicating through language, as well as social cues like facial expressions, body language, and gestures.
The Bottom Line
Speech therapy can provide targeted rehabilitation for memory impairment and other cognitive deficits commonly associated with TBIs. These programs also typically include therapy related to swallowing challenges as well as training on how to speak clearly, so your words come out correctly at all times—even when speaking quickly or in stressful situations such as job interviews or public speeches.
If you’re looking for a brain center in Michigan, get in touch with Galaxy Brain and Therapy Center.
Author’s Bio- The author runs a brain center, and this article is about speech therapy after a TBI.
